When your print has non-white area at the edge, it is a full-bleed print. Full bleed is popular design and needs some extra work. Many customers are surprised when they hear your file needs bleed. So what is full bleed print?
The above picture shows a full bleed file. If any color other than white touches one of the sheet edges, you need full bleed file. You see full bleed prints in magazines, business cards, flyers, brochures and many more. When we make a full bleed print, the file needs to be larger in size than the final desired size. After print the full bleed file, we cut the bleed area to make the final print.
Why do we need full bleed file and printing? Let’s see our favorite letter size (11”x8.5”) document. Printers cannot technically print at the edge and have to have a margin. If you try to print a letter size full bleed document on a letter size paper, you will first get a warning like “One or more margins are set outside the printable area of the page”. If you print it anyway, the area at the printer margin will be simply cut off and will not be printed.
There are two options to handle it. The first one is to shrink the document so that all print area will be inside the printer margin. You may hear from one of us saying if it is okay to have white margin around edges. This means we are changing a full bleed print to a no-bleed print. No-bleed printing requires less work and material, which means it also costs less.
The second option is to print on bigger than letter size paper and cut down to letter size. In this case, if there is no bleed area, cutting along the precise line will be very difficult. If you barely miss it even by 0.01”, your eyes will catch that white thin line along the edge. To prevent this margin of error (and to make a job much easier with many stacked papers), we need the bleed area and cut inside the color area to create great looking full bleed printing.
We usually use 0.125” bleed. To create an 11”x8.5” (letter) size full bleed printing, we use an 11.25”x8.75” full bleed file and cut 0.125” off at four sides (see the above picture). The picture below shows a bad bleed file. If you have any question, you can contact us.
